Dear Readers, of all the many things that you might expect to see in a medieval market town in Somerset, an eight-foot tall metal giraffe is probably one of the most unlikely. But we are staying in The Shrubbery Hotel in Ilminster and, peering out over the car park is a very fine example of the same. We are here for the final clearing out of our Aunt Hilary’s house, and so it’s a sad occasion (and a pretty dusty one too if the last visit was anything to go by). There has been a house on the site since the late 17th Century but the current building was erected in 1850, and very fine it is too. I love the honey-coloured sandstone of the hotel, and of the houses in the town itself. In the photo below you can see how the bits of the facade that have been cleaned up glow in comparison to the more heavily-soiled parts – The Shrubbery is on an extremely busy road, so I imagine the pollution levels are high.

The entrance to the hotel

Now, I do wonder if we’ve made the right choice of hotel because apparently there has been ‘paranormal activity’, with phones ringing in empty rooms, sightings of a Cavalier in the dining room (not a Cavalier King Charles spaniel which is quite a different thing), and several people being ‘touched in the kitchen and the cellar’. Well, anyone who touches me in the cellar is going to get a clip round the ear’ole as my Dad used to say, and I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a Cavalier, so I am agog. Somerset Paranormal Investigators UK used ‘scientific equipment and some old methods’ to see what was going, and reported disembodied voices coming from their walkie-talkies. You can read the whole story here, and I shall report back if I see anything more unusual than an eight-foot metal giraffe.

The tree outside also has more mistletoe than I have ever seen on a single tree.

Just look at it! The light was really bad but I definitely saw a large thrush chasing a woodpigeon out of one of the balls of mistletoe – probably a fieldfare, but I shall see what I can see in the morning when the weather is supposed to be better.

Ilminster really is a most attractive town – there’s more of that lovely stone and a fantastic wisteria….

The Minster church (technically St Marys) dates back to the 15th Century but has been extensively refurbished and renovated during Victorian times. It’s still a most splendid building.

But as usual it’s the quirky things that I like. The town cackles with jackdaws, these two drinking from a handy gutter.

Someone is selling ‘Tattoo Stones’ from a house on the main road.

I was impressed with these extraordinary planters, again on the main road.

And this splendid scare crow clearly wasn’t upsetting any of the corvids.

So, tonight we dine at the hotel, whilst keeping our eyes peeled for ghostly goings on, and tomorrow it’s off to the village of Broadway for another day of sorting through the remains of a lifetime. At a certain point you have to get past being sad, and just focus on the task in hand, and that’s what we’ll do. Let’s see how we get on.

London Planes

Dear Readers, have you ever noticed how many plants are named after cities or countries? This week, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to match the name of the country/city to the photo of the plant. One mark for a correct match, one for naming the plant correctly.

As usual, answers in the comments by 17.00 UK time on Friday 26th November please, with the answers published on Saturday 27th November. I shall ‘disappear’ the responses as soon as I see them, but as always, I would counsel you to write down your answers first, in case you might be influenced by the brilliance of those who have gone before.

So, if you think that the name of the first plant indicates that it’s from London, your answer would be A) 1)

Onwards!

Place Names

1. London
2. Paris
3. Nottingham
4. Spain
5. Denmark
6. Canada
7. Italy
8. New Zealand
9. Wales
10. Portland
11. Japan
12. Russia
13. Mexico
14. America
15. Oxford

Plants

A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

F)

G)

H)

I)

J)

K)

L)

M)

N)

O)

The Coronation Oaks planted in Cherry Tree Wood

Dear Readers, there is nothing like visiting a familiar spot with people who really know it, and so it was a great pleasure to walk around Cherry Tree Wood in East Finchley with Roger Chapman and Kate Brown, who have been involved with the wood for many years. For example, I have strolled past these oaks many times, but Roger was able to tell me that each one was planted on the occasion of a monarch’s coronation – the one on the right for George VI in 1936, and the one on the right for Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Both trees are doing very well, and are mere striplings in terms of age – there’s an oak tree in the grounds of Blenheim Palace which is estimated to be 800 years old, so these have a while to go yet.

Cherry Tree Wood is very different from Coldfall Wood in some ways – it has a café (selling absolutely delicious cakes), tennis courts, public toilets and a playground for children. But it is also part of the same hunting ground as Coldfall Wood, owned in medieval times by the Bishop of London, and like Coldfall Wood it is a hornbeam and oak forest. The hornbeams would have been coppiced (cut to the ground) every year, while the oaks were allowed to grow for up to a hundred years before being harvested for their high-quality timber. The Coronation Oaks must be breathing a sigh of relief that this isn’t what happens these days.

The Friends of Cherry Tree Wood have instigated a number of interesting projects. One is the creation of a small orchard – there is a ‘Core Blimey’ apple tree, which is said to be especially suitable for the clay soil of London, and a cross between a plum and an apricot called a plumcot.

The ‘Core Blimey’ apple

There is a tiny pear tree which is bearing fruit even though it’s just a baby, which is always rather impressive.

The area round about has been planted with some wildflower plugs, and it’s hoped to seed the area in the spring. We’re attempting something similar alongside Muswell Hill Playing Fields, so it was good to discuss the various options.

Around the side of the tennis courts there is a completely unexpected water feature.

This area has always been a bit boggy, but has become impassable this year. There are investigations into drainage, but these things are always tricky. In the meantime, the flag irises are having a lovely time, and it will be interesting to see what else pops up.

There is another pollinator bed just in front of the public conveniences. The walls of the lavatories have a history of being graffitied as soon as a new layer of whitewash is applied, so there is a plan to grow something a thick, resilient and preferably spiky climber. It will be interesting to see how that goes!

Once in the wood itself, you can see the ‘dance’ of the hornbeams, with their twisting trunks indicating that they were coppiced a long, long time ago, and have since been left to run wild.

And how about this oak, that might once have formed part of a hedge boundary? Roger explained how the edge of a field used to run along this line, and that the trees to the left of it are different from the trees to the right.

The colours really are something else. I love the coppers and greens and golds.

And I also loved this fallen tree, which not only looks like a piece of sculpture but will also provide a home for all kinds of beetle larvae and other invertebrates.

At the entrance to the Wood the Friends have planted pollinator beds, which are still in flower now. They are hoping to expand out into what is currently an area of waste space, and to use this to increase their planting and to encourage biodiversity. A plan to introduce Pollinator Pathways around the local area is currently being formulated – there are so many tiny areas of ‘waste space’ across Barnet and the other London Boroughs that could be planted up with sources of food and shelter for bees, butterflies, moths and other invertebrates. I think it’s a great initiative because you wouldn’t need a lot of space – municipal flowerbeds, containers, tiny patches of lawn and lots of corporate ‘gardens’ could be used, with a bit of a nudge and some help and advice.  I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this and other initiatives. I’m finding it all very encouraging.

Dear Readers, the most recent edition of Granta, probably the UK’s leading literary magazine, is featuring travel writing, and the editorial discusses why, in an age of climate change, this has become so much more complicated. The first Granta travel edition was back in 1984, and featured such luminaries as Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. There is a kind of rueful acceptance that those were more innocent, less aware days – the current editor, William Atkins, describes how

‘the travel writer of myth – Bowie knife in one pocket, Moleskine in another, off to Patagonia – is a stubborn ghost, and even in the 1980s, often came across as a revenant of the 1890s: alarmingly erudite, unflappable, prone to affectionate generalisations, and indistinguishable in all but style from the emissaries of colonial power that went before‘.

A little harsh, but still, there was a sense that only particular people were allowed to write about travel, or indeed about nature – Kathleen Jamie’s wonderful description of ‘the Lone Enraptured Male’ nature-writer, striding across the Scottish hillside,  has stuck for a reason. It is a pleasure to see the writing of people who haven’t very often been heard – women of colour such as Jini Reddy, young people such as Dara McAnulty – becoming popular, and bringing a whole new perspective to our experience of the world. There are so many contradictions and complications involved in writing about our experiences of other places, people and animals, and we will always leave something out. Sadly, it’s the something that we don’t notice and take into account that makes all the difference.

The first piece in Granta is by Bathsheba Demuth, and it’s called ‘On Mistaking Whales’. Demuth travels to Chukotka on the Bering Sea to look for gray whales. The Chukchi and Yupik people who live here have hunted the whales from the shore for centuries, the animal being one of the few sources of protein for those who make their homes on these hard shores. The people are still allowed to hunt 140 gray whales every year, though according to the locals there are not enough skilled hunters to take that many, although the villagers need the meat.

The whales that have made this epic journey may well have begun their lives on the other side of the planet, in the lagoons around Baja California. In 2008 I made my own journey to these shallow seas where the gray whales come to give birth. The ‘friendly whales’ are famous because the calves in particular seem to choose to interact on occasion with people , though always with their mothers watching. One calf we saw was as playful as a puppy, frolicking around the whole boat until she’d seen everyone. On other days, we wouldn’t see a single whale. They were making a decision, for reasons of their own, to interact or not interact. These were whales that were hunted almost to extinction, even in these lagoons where they came for sanctuary. They were known as ‘devil fish’ because enraged mother whales would attack the boats. Now, they come voluntarily to investigate what these strange people in their bright-orange lifejackets are doing. The few days that we spent in the lagoon showed me something that I’m pondering still – the sheer unknowability of another creature’s mind, and how every interpretation I cared to put upon what was going on could only be filtered through my own, twentieth-century, Western mind.

Demuth comes upon a gray whale that has been killed by hunters. The hunters are cutting up the meat; one speaks about how the fat is the only thing that makes his grandmother well. And they talk about ‘stink whales’. In the past decade, the hunters explain, some gray whales have developed a strange smell, like iodine. Sometimes the breath of the animals stinks of it, and the hunters avoid them – those who eat this meat develop terrible diarrhoea, and even the dogs won’t eat it. The hunters surmise that it must be something that the whales are eating, but in January 2019 there is an ‘extreme mortality event’, with 384 gray whales washing ashore from Mexico to Alaska and an estimated 7000 killed so far. Many were emaciated, their stomachs full of a ‘black dough’. The cause could be lack of food due to pollution or climate change affecting the whale’s food supply. It could be directly caused by pollutants. It is almost undoubtedly caused by humans.

Demuth gives talks in the USA to audiences about her experiences with the whales, and has taken to ‘warning people about my carnivorous content’. People are horrified at the photos of the whale killed by the Chukchi hunters, and yet feel somehow divorced from whatever is killing thousands of whales. She quotes one woman as asking ‘Wasn’t it simply too much, too  much to  bear‘?

‘I should have said: what we call wealthy society exists in a condition that disarticulates appetite and sustenance from their sources, from the beings who make our bones and our homes. Don’t confuse the distance civilisation keeps from death with the end of dying (my emphasis)’. The land where you live, in close focus, might present another way to arrange the fragments of the past into a story’. 

The article doesn’t end with any neat answers, and neither will I. But this was a most thought-provoking piece, and I suspect that this issue of Granta will provide lots more. The title, by the way, is ‘Should We Have Stayed At Home?’ Good question.

The link to the Granta website is here, though issue 157 isn’t up yet. See if you can persuade someone to buy you a subscription for Christmas if you love good writing.

Stinking iris (Iris foetidissima) seeds

Dear Readers, when I was at Camley Street Natural Park a few weeks ago, I was very taken by these splendid seeds. They belong to the stinking iris (Iris foetidissima), so-called because its leaves are said to smell ‘beefy’ when crushed – one of the plant’s alternative names is ‘roast-beef plant’. Furthermore, it’s also known as gladdon, Gladwin’iris and Stinking Gladwin, with all of these names apparently referencing the Latin word ‘gladius’ meaning sword, and referring to the shape of the leaves.

It’s a very pretty, delicate plant when in flower, as you can see.

This is a native plant, found south of Durham, and it is normally found (in my experience) in damp, shady places. It’s said to prefer calcareous soils, but it was doing very nicely on the clay in the reserve. Richard Mabey (in Flora Britannica) mentions that it’s a plant often found in churchyards, where it was planted not for its modest flowers, but for its bright orange berries, so popular for harvest festival arrangements and grave-top bouquets.

The Plant Lore website mentions that, like other plants with brightly-coloured berries, stinking iris was associated with snakes – in the Isle of Wight it’s known as ‘snakes’ fiddles’. Whether the plant is thought to attract or repel reptiles is something of a mystery. However, the fruits are very popular with birds, particularly blackbirds, who will carry them far and wide.

Much of the detail on medicinal uses of the plant come from Ireland: the leaves can be roasted, sewn together and worn around the neck as a cure for tonsillitis or mumps, and the juice is said to be a cure for dropsy. The plant is poisonous, however, and in Mrs. Grieves ‘A Modern Herbal‘ (published at the beginning of the 20th century), the author describes how stinking iris has been:

“employed for the same medicinal purposes as the Yellow Flag and is equally violent in its action. A decoction of the roots acts as a strong purge. It has also been used as an emmenagogue and for cleansing eruptions. The dried root, in powder or as an infusion, is good in hysterical disorders, fainting, nervous complaints and to relieve pains and cramps.”

So don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Now, here’s an interesting photo, by Patrick Roper, taken in East Sussex. He speculates that ants may play a part in the pollination of the stinking iris, and they certainly seem to be paying a lot of attention to the flower. I haven’t noticed the usual bees and hoverflies on my yellow flag irises, but according to the interwebs bees are still the main pollinators. Nonetheless I think that ants can often be involved in transporting pollen from one place to another, albeit unwittingly.

Stinking Iris flower with ants by Patrick Roper

Of the many moths in the UK, only the caterpillars of the rosy minor (Litoligia literosa) seem to have developed a taste for stinking iris.The camouflage on the adult below is particularly striking.

Rosy Minor moth (Photo One)

And finally, a poem. I love this, by Louise Glück. I’m not completely sure that she’s talking about a stinking iris, but it will do.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Ben Sale from UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

A very fine crab apple on Huntingdon Road in East Finchley

Dear Readers, there were some lovely suggestions for poems for autumn in the comments, so I thought I’d collect them here. Plus, it gives me a chance to show off some more leaf photos. If you’ve thought of any more favourites, fire away! There’s still time for a few more before I start thinking about winter.

First up, here’s an old favourite, suggested by Anne. I knew the first few lines (as I suspect does every child who was at school in the 60s and 70s) but that doesn’t stop it being very beautiful. I especially like that line about ‘ Thy hair soft-lifted by a winnowing wind’. Time for another look, I think.

To Autumn – John Keats – 1795-1821

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Hornbeam leaves (Carpinus betulus)

Sllgatsby had some lovely, lovely poems, including one by Edna St Vincent Millay. This one reminds me of an autumn visit to Canada, when the fall colour was almost too much to bear. Can you be moved to tears by a bunch of maples? Well, I certainly was.

God’s World by Edna St Vincent Millay

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

And how about this one, also suggested by sllgatsby. This is by American poet Sarah Teasdale. It’s the bit about ‘the voices of little insects’ that gets me every time. Of course it does.

September Midnight by Sarah Teasdale

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.

Muswell Hill Playing Fields

Sandra Gibson gave a friend a weekly ‘gift’ of a poem for her birthday – what a splendid idea! First up, here’s a poem by Jean Sprackland – I reviewed her books ‘Strands‘ and ‘Those Silent Mansions‘, but wasn’t so familiar with her poetry, something I shall have to remedy.

October by Jean Sprackland

Skies, big skies, careening over in the wind
great shoals of cloud pitching and jostling
in their rush to be anywhere other than here

You hesitate on your doorstep, glance up
and something tugs in your chest, rips free like a leaf
and is sucked up and away. Everything’s

finished here: raw-boned sycamores,
fields scalped and sodden. The houses are shut
and dustbins roll in their own filth in the street

So you would take your chances, risk it all…
You stand for a moment with the keys in your hand
Feeling the hard pull of the sky and the moment passing

I love Maya Angelou’s poetry, but hadn’t come across this one from Sandra’s archive.

Late October by Maya Angelou

Carefully

the leaves of autumn
sprinkle down the tinny
sound of little dyings
and skies sated
of ruddy sunsets
of roseate dawns
roil ceaselessly in
cobweb greys and turn
to black
for comfort.

Only lovers

see the fall
a signal end to endings
a gruffish gesture alerting
those who will not be alarmed
that we begin to stop
in order to begin
again.

And here from Sandra’s treasure trove is a poem by a poet that I hadn’t come across before, Ann Pilling. The last two lines are corkers, for sure.

Weeping Ash by Ann Pilling 2020

It died quietly in the night. If there were death throes
the gale swallowed them; and it fell with care
sideways on to a holly tree which soon bounced back,
we can see the hills now and we have more light.

I will miss all of it, its witchy branches, its long hair,
its stubborn refusal to leaf until spring
had all but passed into summer. Only then
did its long black fingernails unfurl to green.

The logs, stacked up in chequered rows against a wall,
will last several winters. Ash burns well.
In the dark months we can pull up close,
warm our hands at its flame

as those we have loved warm
us when we remember them

And finally, here are two haikus, the first by Gert Loveday of the wonderful Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books website. If you are not familiar with it, and if you love books, hotfoot it over to the site and see what you think. There are in fact two Gerts, and I’m not sure who exactly wrote this one. I love it regardless.

the swish of the broom

sweeping fallen leaves~
the light fades

And finally finally another Haiku chosen by Gert, this one by Saigyo.

even someone

free of passion as myself
feels sorrow:
snipe rising from a marsh
at evening in autumn

Such varied poems, all of them touched with both melancholy and hope. Just right for my current mood, and for the turning year I think. I hope you enjoyed them, and feel free to suggest any more that you like in the comments. The world needs all the poetry that it can get at the moment.

Dear Readers it might have been grey and overcast, but the autumn colour in the cemetery makes up for any lack of blue skies. The various cherries, crab apples and maples were putting on a very fine show on Saturday, when we went for our usual walk. And it’s the day before Remembrance Sunday, so the memorials to the dead of Islington and St Pancras, and to the soldiers who fell in both world wars, were garlanded with poppies.

‘My’ swamp cypress is starting to put on its autumn cloak of colours, though it will be a few weeks before it reaches a crescendo.

I love the energy that the robins put into defending their winter territories – they are the only birds who are actually singing, as opposed to calling, at this time of year.

I have always wondered why it is that some leaves on a tree fall before others. Is it random? Do the leaves at the tips of branches fall first? Every year I look, and every year I’m more confused. I’m sure there’s a scientific study in there somewhere. Any thoughts, readers? The tree below is clearly a maple of some kind (says she hopefully), probably a field maple though I’m happy to be corrected.

There were crows everywhere today, and they seemed to be mostly interested in turning over the damp turf in the search for worms and grubs. This one, though, clearly has loftier ambitions.

The white deadnettle is still in flower, which will be handy for any passing bees.

I had never noticed how red the stems are on the sycamore leaves either.

And look how red the bramble leaves sometimes turn!

There is a little Japanese maple down by the stream, though whether it was planted or just blown in I don’t know. What is astonishing is the red of the leaves, even as the tree itself is overwhelmed by brambles and nettles.

And the Japanese Knotweed is forming a positive forest along the edge of the cemetery.

The ginkgo leaves are still falling….

And in a small miracle, someone has stood the fallen angel from last week back onto her feet again! No wonder she’s raising a victory salute.

I rather liked this fallen leaf – does anyone else think it looks like a little face? Seeing faces in objects is apparently called pareidolia, and apparently it was once thought to be a symptom of psychosis. These days it’s considered a normal part of the brain’s desire to make sense of things.

A friend told me that this area is where the cemetery cats are buried. I’m glad that they’ve got their own little space. Dusky was the most splendid of moggies and patrolled his/her area with great aplomb. I haven’t seen them for several years.

Dusky the cemetery cat from 2016.

And finally there is a right old brouhaha, and a flock of a dozen ring-necked parakeets flies overhead. They seem to be in a perpetual state of high excitement, shrieking the news at one another and then suddenly flying off, making a complete circle and ending up back in their original tree.

They are not the most peaceable of neighbours, but they are certainly the liveliest.